Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lios depending on regional usage, were the typical farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century. A bank and ditch, sometimes doubled or tripled, defined a family's living space and provided a degree of protection for livestock. Tens of thousands were built across the island, and Clare has more than its share, scattered across the Burren limestone and the gentler pastureland to the south and east.

Sooreeny is a small rural townland, and the ringfort there is one of those sites that persists in the record without yet accumulating much documented history around it. The detailed picture of who built it, when precisely it was in use, and what if anything was found there remains to be fully established from available sources. What can be said is that its survival into the present, even in partial form, places it in the company of monuments that outlasted the civilisation that made them, absorbed into field boundaries or simply left alone in corners of farmland where ploughing never quite reached.